Word: tankful
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...more U.S. cities, local officials across the land have been engaged in quirky battles of one-upmanship to get their hometown chosen as a demo site. Topeka, Kans., renamed itself Google for the month of March. The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., went swimming in a shark tank as a publicity stunt. And Greenville organized a "We Are Feeling Lucky" campaign - a play on Google's second most famous search button - with enough glow sticks to form a massive Google logo in a downtown park. (See historical photos on Google Earth...
...uncomfortable. Teachers complain that we are rewarding kids for doing what they should be doing of their own volition. Psychologists warn that money can actually make kids perform worse by cheapening the act of learning. Parents predict widespread slacking after the incentives go away. And at least one think-tank scholar has denounced the strategy as racist. The debate has become a proxy battle for the larger war over why our kids are not learning at the rate they should be despite decades of reforms and budget increases...
...direct democracy campaigners are split on its merits. Bruno Kaufmann, president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute Europe think tank, welcomed the move, saying "it will force people to reflect on how Europe really works." But Carsten Berg, coordinator of the European Citizens' Initiative, an organization advocating more direct democracy in the E.U., warned that the "intrusive personal data requirements, narrow topics and unclear follow-up could render it unusable." And Janis Emmanouilidis, an analyst at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think tank, believes it could backfire. "One million people is a low threshold and it risks falling...
...talk of stirring democracy, critics say the experience of such schemes in places like California and Switzerland shows that some initiatives fail to generate reasoned debate and open participation. Jean-Thomas Leseuer, head of the Thomas More Institute, a Paris-based think tank, says citizens' initiatives amount to mere democratic window dressing. "It is not with old tools that we will build Europe," he says. "This proposal is too heavy and complicated to impose on Europe before anything like a European consciousness exists. I bet that there will be very few initiatives." (See pictures of Paris expanding...
...contribution to EMP Recognition Day, the Heritage Foundation - sounding more like the Green Party than the conservative think tank that it is - is urging lawmakers to shut down congressional cafeterias, walk to work, shut off their BlackBerries and turn off the lights. "If Congress took these four steps for one day," the Heritage Foundation says, "all members would understand the magnitude of the dangers posed by an EMP attack." (They'll also be slimmer, healthier and more mellow...